By the end of 2014, Tim Cook was CNN‘s CEO of the year, the Financial Times‘ Person of the Year and a Time Magazine POY runner up. The stock meanwhile, had split 7 for 1, grown 40%, and added nearly $200 billion to Apple’s market value.

What the hell happened? Here’s what I remember:

The low point: In Haunted Empire: Apple after Steve Jobs, Yukari Kane asked whether Apple could “stay great without its iconic leader” and concluded — 385 pages later — that it could not. If Harper Collins had hoped to cash in on the “Apple is doomed” theme that bottom feeders like Business Insider were using for link bait, they were, in late March 2014, too late. Tim Cook called it “nonsense” and so did nearly every review.

The pivot: If Wall Street has an Apple bit, it flipped from 0 to 1 four weeks later, on April 23. That’s when Apple announced that it had clobbered Q2 earnings expectations, was splitting shares 7 for 1, had upped its dividend and launched the biggest share repurchase program in history. “Buy Apple, before Tim [Cook] does it himself,” RBC’s Amit Daryanani told his clients. The stock popped: $44 per share (8.3%) in after-hours trading.

The swagger: Like a heavy meal, Apple’s two-hour WWDC keynote in early June took some time to digest. There were major updates to not one but two operating systems. New health and home monitoring interfaces. Dozens of new ways to tie one Apple product to another. A whole new programming language. A new confidence — almost a swagger — on stage. “The message was loud and resonant from where I sat,” wrote The Verge’s Joshua Topolsky. “‘We’re back, we’re ready to play, and we know who we are.’”

The big reveal: The build-up started in May, when Eddy Cue promised “the best product pipeline that I’ve seen in my 25 years at Apple.” It continued when Apple chose for its venue the same Silicon Valley auditorium where Steve Jobs had unveiled the Mac 30 years earlier. By the time the Sept. 9 event was over, Apple had introduced two sustaining products (the big and bigger iPhone 6 and 6 Plus) and two new product categories (Apple Pay and Apple Watch) with the potential to disrupt whole new industries. One month later Apple refreshed its iPad line and introduced what even Windows loyalists conceded may be the best desktop computer on the market.

Cook’s time: This was the year Tim Cook found his voice. In March he put a narrow-minded shareholder in his place (“If you want me to do things only for ROI reasons, you should get out of this stock”). In June he described Google’s Android as a “toxic hellstew of vulnerabilities.“ In October, he came out. “I’m proud to be gay,” he wrote in a pitch-perfect Businessweek essay.

I don’t consider myself an activist, but I realize how much I’ve benefited from the sacrifice of others. So if hearing that the CEO of Apple is gay can help someone struggling to come to terms with who he or she is, or bring comfort to anyone who feels alone, or inspire people to insist on their equality, then it’s worth the trade-off with my own privacy.”

I’m looking forward to 2015. Apple closed the books on its first fiscal quarter on Saturday. We’ll get the results in three or four weeks. This should be fun.

Better late than never: Apple puts ‘The Interview’ on iTunes

Google and Microsoft had it first — on Christmas Eve at 1 p.m. ET — and to them went the best soundbites:

“A cyberattack on anyone’s rights is a cyberattack on everyone’s rights,” said Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith.

“We could not sit on the sidelines and allow a handful of people to determine the limits of free speech in another country (however silly the content might be),” Google’s official blog proclaimed.

Apple wasn’t last to the party — Comcast still doesn’t offer Sony Pictures’ “The Interview” to their customers. But when the movie appeared on iTunes at 1 p.m. ET Sunday, it was four days late.

“We’re pleased to offer The Interview for rental or purchase on the iTunes store,” was the comment Apple PR gave Fortune and anyone else who asked.

What Apple wouldn’t say — at least on the record — is what took so long.

Apple’s online video operation is bigger than either Google’s or Microsoft’s, but that shouldn’t matter. It may put more care into the quality of its HD video, but that doesn’t take four days. I’m pretty sure Apple doesn’t look any more kindly than its competitors on cyber vandalism or threats of physical violence. I imagine that Tim Cook is just as patriotic as Eric Schmidt — the Google chairman who reportedly brokered the deal that put Sony Pictures’ comedy about a C.I.A. plot to kill the leader of North Korea on YouTube, Google Play and X-Box Live.

One explanation I’ve read — that the entire iTunes team was on vacation — is just mundane enough to be true. Perhaps Apple, unlike Google, believes the Christmas holidays are sacrosanct.

For whatever reason, Sony — and Apple’s iTunes customers — just had to wait.

UPDATE: Sony announced Sunday that the “The Interview” had been downloaded more than 2 million times, generating more than $15 million in the first four days of its release. That’s not a big opening, by Hollywood standards, but it’s not bad for a movie that still hasn’t made it to the multiplex.

Apple shorts jump ship

The number of shares sold short in Apple — usually a bet placed by speculators who think that the stock is more likely to go down than up in the near future — dropped by 24.5 million to 53.7 million, a plunge of 31%, reports Douglas A. McIntyre on 24/7WallStreet.

Apple edged out Intel, which saw its short interest fall 23.6 million.

The trigger for the fall-off in the Apple short interest is likely two reasons. The first is the robust increase in its share price over the past three months. The stock has risen over 14% during that period. The second reason short sellers were likely exited was that, not only did Apple post strong earnings in the last quarter, but analysts expect demand will push iPhone sales to a record as consumers rush to buy the new iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus.

‘The Interview': Apple enters the picture – YouTube update

On Monday, the Hollywood Reporterand Variety reported that Sony was looking for a way to release “The Interview” digitally, as video on demand. In Tuesday’s New York Times, Brooks Barnes and Michael Cieply put Apple in the picture:

It remained unclear, however, whether any on-demand service would take ‘The Interview.’ According to people briefed on the matter, Sony had in recent days asked the White House for help in lining up a single technology partner — Apple, which operates iTunes — but the tech company was not interested, at least not on a speedy time table. An Apple spokesman declined to comment.”

Speedy time table indeed! This story is moving too quickly — who knows where it’s going to land? But it’s got the makings of a great movie script. It’s got Hollywood. It’s got hackers. It’s got a terror plot. It’s got a loony dictator. It’s got the White House.

And now it has Apple.

We’re down to the wire here, folks. It’s Christmas Eve. Good or bad, America wants to see this movie. The President wants us to see this movie. If Tim Cook is going step up, join the art houses, and put this reckless lowbrow comedy on Apple TV, now’s the time.

Not one hour after we heard YouTube had “tentatively agreed” to offer The Interview as a rental, Sony Pictures has confirmed the film will be available online starting today at 1PM ET. It’ll be offered through YouTube Movies, Google Play, Xbox Videos, and a dedicated website SeeTheInterview.com.

The film will cost $5.99 to rent and $14.99 to own an HD copy. Notably absent from the list: Apple’s iTunes, which reportedly said no despite White House involvement, and Sony’s own PlayStation Network.”

The iPhone, the carriers and the credit mules – update

Matthew Shaer’s piece in the current issue of Wired about the Secret World of Stolen Smartphones covers all kinds of theft — from subway “Apple picking” to warehouse smash-and-grabs.

But he leads with a provocative anecdote that I wish he had come back to.

The story starts with a FedEx package that broke open in Rancho Cordova, Calif., revealing 37 shrink-wrapped iPhones. Police took the serial numbers, taped the package back up, and waited to see where it went.

It led them, according to Shaer, to a middleman named Wasif Shamshad, a pair of Chinese-Americans — Shou Lin Wen, and his wife, Yuting Tan — and a larger shipment of 190 iPhones addressed to an apartment in Hong Kong.

A picture,” Shaer writes, “slowly emerged of a so-called credit-mule scheme, ingenious in its simplicity and impressive in its reach. Middlemen such as Shamshad were dispatched to seemingly random American cities, where they trolled homeless shelters and halfway houses, offering $100 to anyone who would buy, on their behalf, a few on-contract phones from a local electronics store.

“Back in California, the contraband was handed off to Wen and Tan, who arranged to have the phones shipped to their contacts in Asia. The profit margin was enormous: In North America, wireless carriers typically subsidize the cost of our smartphones in order to lure us into multiyear voice and data contracts. To obtain a phone, in other words, we fork over a small fraction of the device’s actual market worth. Wen and Tan took advantage of the system by obtaining iPhones—through middlemen and mules—for $200 a pop, then selling them in China for close to $1,000.”

Help me out here. The only way I can see a $200 iPhone getting sold for $1,000 in China is if someone paid the subsidized price and skipped out on a contractual obligation — either to pay it off over time or to stick with the carrier for the duration of the contract.

Either way, the carriers — who pay Apple full price, or nearly so — would be stuck holding the bag. According to Shaer, the investigators who confiscated those 190 iPhones spent hours on the phone sorting things out with representatives from Sprint, AT&T and Verizon Wireless.

I’d always assumed that the long lines of Asians camped outside New York’s Apple stores were involved in some kind of arbitrage, making a bit of spending money on the difference between the U.S. price of an iPhone and what rich buyers in China are willing to pay. That’s a legitimate business.

I have to assume that everyone who waited so patiently in line was there on legitimate business. But re-watching the video after reading Shaer’s story, it’s hard not to have second thoughts.

Apple declined to comment, except to say that before customers can walk out of any Apple store with a subsidized iPhone they must provide their name, social security number (last four digits) and two forms of ID. The information is sent, via hand-held EasyPay terminal, to the carriers. Only if a customer is deemed credit-worthy by the carrier’s computer does the sale go through. AT&T, which uses a similar credit-checking procedure in its stores, declined to comment.

[UPDATE: Sprint was more forthcoming. “Once we introduced the iPhone we were seeing just rampant credit muling,” a spokesman told 9News-TV’s Jeremy Jojola last April. “There are many laws being broken by this kind of activity, so Sprint has actually filed about 40 lawsuits — Federal lawsuits — all over the country.”

Jojola caught a couple guys running a credit mule operation at the Apple Store in Denver’s Cherry Creek Shopping Center and filed a pretty thorough report — including an interview with a homeless guy who was surprised his bad credit was good enough to get contracts. Link: Caught on camera: 9Wants to Know exposes ‘iScheme’]

Is Henry Blodget, gasp, right about Apple and the BBC?

How bad was the BBC’s investigation of Apple’s Asian supply chain — the one that discovered last week that Chinese factory workers take scheduled naps and that tin mining in Indonesia is a dirty business?

So bad that even Business Insider’s Henry Blodget — the master of anti-Apple clickbait — felt obliged to come to Cupertino’s defense.

“If this really is news to you,” he wrote in Yahoo, “you’ve been living in denial. If you’re suddenly appalled at Apple, moreover, you should acknowledge a few things:

Apple is more transparent about working conditions in its supply chain than just about any other company in the world (and you already know how depressing these conditions are)…

Apple has made enormous improvements in the working conditions in its supply chain over the last several years, and it continues to make them. Apple also freely acknowledges that it’s not perfect and has lots of work left to do. (An admirably honest assessment.)

.

“More painfully obvious bullet points in the full thing here,” writes the MacDailyNews, a site that never has anything bad to say about Apple and can’t bring itself to say anything good about Blodget.

“Blaming Apple for poor work conditions at Chinese companies,” MDN adds, coming back to the BBC broadcast,” is like blaming Bono for the spread of AIDS in Africa.”

I wrote about the 3-minute clip the BBC posted Thursday. I liked the undercover footage inside the iPhone factory.

The full 48-minute episode arrived on YouTube Friday afternoon. It was a mess. In a memo to the UK staff, operations manager Jeff Williams said he and Tim Cook were “deeply offended,” by the suggestion that it had broken a promise to its workers. In Indonesia, Williams writes,

Apple has two choices: We could make sure all of our suppliers buy tin from smelters outside of Indonesia, which would probably be the easiest thing for us to do and would certainly shield us from criticism. But it would be the lazy and cowardly path, because it would do nothing to improve the situation for Indonesian workers or the environment since Apple consumes a tiny fraction of the tin mined there. We chose the second path, which is to stay engaged and try to drive a collective solution.”

He might have added that 375,000 tons of tin are mined each year and Apple, by one estimate, consumes less than 0.4% — mostly as tiny drops of solder. Even if we accept Blodget’s premise that everybody who owns an Apple product shares some of the responsibility for the lives lost and coral smothered, it’s not a terribly big share.

Sleeping on the job: Inside a factory making iPhones for Apple

Whoever shot the video from inside the Pegatron iPhone 6 factory that aired Thursday night on the BBC — he or she is identified only as one of several “undercover reporters” — got some good stuff: The answers to Apple’s mandatory health-and-safety exam being chanted out loud to a roomful of job applicants. Applicants being required to volunteer to work nights and standing up. The must-carry Chinese government ID cards of new hires being confiscated — all direct violations of Apple’s supplier conduct rules.

But the money shot for me was the clip of an exhausted worker — a young woman with Crayola-colored hair — nodding off on the line.

There is a human cost to manufacturing at high speed tens of millions of electronic devices — Apple’s and everybody else’s — and it is paid overwhelmingly by factory workers in China and Southeast Asia.

Those Foxconn assembly workers who jumped out their dormitory windows should have told us all we needed to know about how bad it can be.

But it’s interesting that what caught the eye of the undercover reporters — and what the BBC’s Richard Bilton chose to focus on — was people falling asleep on the job.

It makes sense. To get the job done for Apple, Pegatron had to staff up rapidly and schedule a lot of overtime. Those 12-hour shifts — as any CIA interrogator can tell you — take their toll.

Apple in a statement to the BBC said that it was not unusual for workers to take sleep breaks. And it added, not incorrectly:

We are aware of no other company doing as much as Apple to ensure fair and safe working conditions. We work with suppliers to address shortfalls, and we see continuous and significant improvement, but we know our work is never done.”

But I’ve come around. It’s true that every major high-tech manufacturer exploits the same Asian workforce. But no one relies more heavily on that workforce than Apple. How could you do the story without them?

Fallon has a long history with Apple. His desk on the set always sports the latest-model MacBook. He’s done live iPad-assisted duets with the likes of Billy Joel and Robert Plant. And he teamed up this fall with Justin Timberlake to do some brilliant — but uncredited — voice work on a series of iPhone 6 ads.

I don’t know enough about how these marketing deals are put together to know who footed what part of the bill for Fallon’s iPads — which start at $499 for Wi-Fi only.

But we learned in the aftermath of Oprah Winfrey’s “You’ve got a car! You’ve got a car!” event that there’s no such thing as a free Pontiac. Winfrey declared the cars as $28,500 “prizes” — not gifts — which put the recipients on the hook for as much as $7,000 in taxes.

Of Apple, Rubles and iPhones

If you’re an upwardly mobile Moscovite getting paid in rubles and you’ve seen the dollar value of your monthly salary fall from $2,500 to $1,000, you’re going to be looking with some urgency for a way to convert those rubles before their value falls even further.

At the Apple store in the AviaPark mall, Sergey Akimov, a 22-year-old technology worker, said his dreams of foreign travel had evaporated, so he was spending the money on a new iPhone 6, selling in rubles for considerably less than its American price of $650 because of the rapidly depreciating exchange rate. ‘This is instead of my vacation,’ he said, smiling. The store raised prices during the day as the currency slid.”

As it happens, there are no Apple Stores in Russia. But there has been, since the summer of 2013, an online Apple Store. It’s Apple’s main direct interface with the country’s consumers, and it was going gangbusters even before the currency collapse. Russian iPhone sales doubled in 2013 to 1.57 million, according to IDC, and added another 1.9 million units in the first nine months of 2014.

The ruble’s subsequent free-fall made the iPhone an increasing popular alternative to cash — especially since you could freeze the device’s selling price in rubles by ordering it online. Apple raised prices 25% across the board last month, but it was not enough.

On Tuesday, citing “extreme currency fluctuations,” Apple suspended online sales in Russia of all its products.

“Our online store in Russia is currently unavailable while we review pricing,” said an Apple spokesman. “We apologize to customers for any inconvenience.”

iPhones should be the least of Russia’s worries right now. But there you have it.

Apple wins a unanimous victory in the iTunes antitrust case

It was mess from the start — a mash-up of several class action suits that took nearly 10 years to come to trial.

The jury heard two weeks of testimony — including a 20-minute deposition from an ailing Steve Jobs taped six months before he died.

But it took the eight jurors less than three hours Tuesday to reach a unanimous verdict: Apple’s iTunes 7.0, released in the fall of 2006, was a “genuine product improvement.”

It was not, as the class-action lawyers who claimed to represent 8 million aggrieved iPod owners alleged, a monopolist’s devious stratagem whose sole purpose was to strengthen its market dominance by turning competing products into high-tech bricks.

The jury was spared the embarrassing back-and-forth that saw the two remaining plaintiffs booted off the case and a new one — an ice dancer from Massachusetts — flown in at the last minute.

“This case illustrates the tension present in any case where competitors are injured as a result of a change in technology by the dominant firm in the market,” said Cornell law professor George Hay. “Courts are hesitant to punish firms for improving their products even if there are reasons to believe that the improvements were modest and that the firm was intentionally trying to disadvantage competitors.”

“We thank the jury for their service and we applaud their verdict,” Apple said in a statement. “We created iPod and iTunes to give our customers the world’s best way to listen to music. Every time we’ve updated those products — and every Apple product over the years — we’ve done it to make the user experience even better.”

The plaintiffs’ lawyers, who had asked for $350 million in damages — or more than a $1 billion in triple damages — said Tuesday that they planned to appeal.